OpenSea - Yet The Biggest NFT Marketplace (2024)

How to navigate the oceans of the biggest NFT marketplace?

OpenSea bills itself as the first and largest NFT marketplace in the world. To put it another way, OpenSea is like eBay for digital assets and collectibles.

Alex Atallah and Devin Finzer founded OpenSea in New York City in 2017. Shortly after, they applied to the renowned Y Combinator startup accelerator and received a million investment.

Early on, the OpenSea team had a lot to prove. Aside from early fads like CryptoKitties, NFTs had yet to catch on before 2021. However, the team’s prediction that people would soon value digital objects as much — if not more — than physical ones began to come true. Here’s some context to help you understand what OpenSea is.

The trading of cryptocurrency tokens laid the groundwork for the current NFT boom. People all over the world trade digital currency and utility tokens 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They are at ease with digitally owning items they cannot see or feel, indicating that the digital native era has arrived.

Pros

• The market’s largest collection of NFTs.
• The mobile app is available for iOS and Android.
• Smart contracts secure OpenSea, making fraudulent transactions nearly impossible.
• Without any knowledge of blockchain or coding, you can easily start your own NFT collection.
• Powerful Discord community

Cons

• When using, buying, or selling on OpenSea, an external crypto wallet is required. That is, without one, you will be unable to buy or sell on the platform
• The platform only accepts cryptocurrency payments, creating a bias against non-crypto users.

The Uniqueness of the Marketplace

Using OpenSea is super easy and the only thing you’ll need to start is a Web3 wallet. As one of the world’s top NFT platforms, OpenSea offers many options for compatible wallets to use.

Don’t panic if you don’t have a Web3 wallet yet. We recommend you set up a Metamask wallet as it is easy to use and doesn’t require you to go through a KYC process.

Buying and Selling Options

Even though moving into Web3 spaces can be daunting, the team behind OpenSea put in the work to make it the best place to buy NFTs for everyone.

There are several options when it comes to buying or selling your first NFT on OpenSea, let’s go through them all to give you an idea of how things work.

Buy Now

Not a lot to say here. If the NFT you find is available for sale, you’ll quickly notice it by the big blue button that says: “Buy now”.

Buying an NFT at a fixed price will create transaction fees which are to be paid by the buyer. Depending on the Blockchain the NFT was created on, these gas prices can get expensive.

Offer

Next to buying for a fixed price, you can always choose to make an offer to buy an NFT off its owner. If an offer is accepted, the seller will pay the gas fees needed for the transaction.

Before making an offer you have to swap your Ethereum tokens for WETH (wrapped Ethereum token). WETH is used to give pre-authorized bids that can be fulfilled later without any further action needed by users.

English Auction

The English auction type is similar to classic online auction platforms, the item for auction will be sold to the highest bidder after the predetermined time has surpassed.

If a bid is placed in the last ten minutes of the auction, the timer will jump to ten minutes again. This makes auctions for NFTs a very exciting process if the piece you are bidding for is being desired by many.

The cool thing about this auction type is that sellers can set up a reserve price for the NFT before putting it up for auction. If an auction finishes below the set reserve price, the seller can choose to accept the highest offer or to hold on to the NFT without selling it.

However, if the seller chooses to accept an offer below 1 ETH or their respective reserve price (the reserve price must be above 1 ETH), they will have to cover gas fees. OpenSea will cover the gas fees if the auction finishes with a price above 1 ETH.

Dutch Auction

The Dutch auction type differs from the English in one major point. Instead of setting up a start price and waiting for the highest bidder, sellers set up a maximum and minimum price and let the auction run from the high end to the minimum price they accept.

Buyers can give up offers above the current price and if the seller accepts it, the same rules for transaction fees apply as in the English auction.

NFT Categories

Sitting at the top of the top NFT exchanges, Opensea offers a plethora of different NFT categories.

Whether you are an aspiring artist wanting to share your artwork with the world, or a musician that produces beats to sell them as NFTs. OpenSea got you covered again, with all these different options it’s the best NFT marketplace for artists today.

OpenSea sells every type of non-fungible token imaginable. Here is a list of some of the different types of NFTs available on the OpenSea marketplace:

• Art
• Collectibles
• Domain Names
• Music
• Photography
• Sports
• Trading Cards
• Utility
• Virtual Worlds

Unlike some other NFT marketplaces, OpenSea does not concentrate on a single niche within the NFT community. Instead, OpenSea provides a marketplace for both creators and collectors to buy, sell, and create various NFTs.

Wallets You Can Connect to OpenSea

What crypto wallets are compatible with OpenSea? There are numerous crypto wallet providers to choose from, just as there are numerous banks and credit cards. They all serve the same function, but they each take a different approach and make different tradeoffs.

The full list of wallets supported by OpenSea can be found below.

MetaMask – The leader wallet, a flexible browser extension, and mobile app. MetaMask is the most popular web 3 wallet and one of the industry’s oldest players.

Coinbase Wallet – Using a dapp browser, users can explore the decentralized web with the Coinbase Wallet app. To use the Coinbase Wallet app, you do not need a Coinbase account.

TrustWallet – A non-custodial mobile wallet with an additional layer of security that stores your private key locally.

Portis – Access dApps using an email address and password from almost any web browser on any device, including mobile phones.

Fortmatic/Magic – An innovative team’s user-friendly wallet that allows you to sign up with your phone number from any device.

Venly – Previously known as Arkane, all a user needs to use this wallet is a PC and a web browser.

Authereum– A wallet designed for ease of use, with no transaction fees and a fiat on-ramp.

Bitski – An easy-to-use wallet that requires users to sign up with an email address and a password.

Dapper – is a browser extension that will pay your gas bills for you.

Kaikas – is a browser extension that allows websites to interact with the Klaytn network. Kaikas for Chrome can be downloaded here.

OperaTouch – Opera Crypto Wallet is compatible with both your Opera computer browser and your mobile device’s Opera Touch for iOS (or Opera for Android) browser.

Torus – A low-friction wallet that supports Facebook, Google, and other OAuth providers.

WalletConnect – WalletConnect is a protocol that is supported by a wide range of Dapps and wallets. Install any WalletConnect-compatible mobile wallets.

WalletLink – is an open protocol that allows you to connect your mobile wallet to DApps running in any browser, such as Coinbase Wallet.

Supported Blockchains

Speaking of blockchains, using Opensea you can choose between different options to trade your NFTs. Ethereum is the largest NFT platform for artists, followed by Polygon and Klaytn which both offer NFTs at lower gas-prices for transactions and minting but come at the cost of lower transaction volume.

Summary

OpenSea is the most known and largest NFT marketplace. Talking about marketplaces we can’t help but mention it in the first place. Nearly any NFT collection based on ETH you’ll find on OpenSea. The application is easy to use, and you can browse NFTs any time no matter you’re with your PC or using the phone.